historical documents bear witness would be the charter and sign-manual of the eternal separation of races. CHAPTER XII HOW THE RACES WERE PHYSIOLOGICALLY SEPARATED, AND THE DIFFERENT VARIETIES FORMED BY THEIR INTER-MIXTURE. THEY ARE UNEQUAL IN STRENGTH AND BEAUTY The question of cosmic influences is one that ought to be fully cleared up, as I am confining myself to arguments based on it. The first problem with which I have to deal is the following:—“How could men, whose common origin implies a single starting-point, have been exposed to such a diversity of influences from without?” After the first separation of races, the groups were already numerous enough to be found under totally different conditions of climate; how then, considering the immense difficulties they had to contend against, the vast forests and marshy plains they had to cross, the sandy or snowy deserts, the rivers, lakes, and oceans—how, with all these obstacles, did they manage to cover distances which civilized man to-day, with all his developed power, can only surmount with great toil and trouble? To answer these objections, we must try to discover where the human species had its original home. A very ancient idea, adopted also by some great modern minds, such as Cuvier, is that the different mountain-systems must have served as the point of departure for certain races. According to this theory, the white races, and even certain African varieties whose skull is shaped like our own, had their first settlement in the Caucasus. The yellow race came down from the ice-bound heights of the Altai. Again, the tribes of prognathous negroes built their first huts on the southern slopes of Mount Atlas, and made this the starting-point of their first migrations. Thus, the frightful places of the earth, difficult of access and full of gloomy horror—torrents, caverns, icy mountains, eternal snows, and impassable abysses—were actually more familiar to primitive ages than any others; while all the terrors of the unknown lurked, for our first ancestors, in the uncovered plains, on the banks of the great rivers, on the coasts of the lakes and seas.